Free Will or Not?

This episode explores the issue of free will in the framework of Christianity. If you believe in God, how do you view God’s heart toward humanity?  This is really at the core of the issues surrounding free will and predestination.  Who is God and how does God purpose to interact with humanity?  The God I know is a loving God who welcomes all into relationship who desire relationship.

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen today. The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns. This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony. Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul; considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences. Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul. It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives. I look forward to what is to come, what future stops we’ll take along the journey together. I’ll see you at the next stop.

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Transcript

Episode 4 - Free Will or Not?

Intro - The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns.  This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony.  Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul;  considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences.  Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubt about the journey of the soul.  It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives.  

Welcome - Welcome to Soul Sojourn. My name is Jenn Pedersen.  As I continue my mini series on defining the terms, today I’m going to explore the concepts of free will and predestination here in the 4th episode of Soul Sojourn.   As I consider these ideas I think of my relationship with my children, who are now 25, 23, & 21.  As they came into my life as infants and grew into toddlers and then entered their elementary school years, there was a dependency they had on their dad and I to provide for them, to meet their needs - basically to keep them alive and guide them in life.  As all kids do from a young age, they expressed desire and attachment and love from us - they wanted our attention and care and interest in their lives but in the younger years there is an element of dependency that drives this love and attachment in children.  As my kids entered their teen years that dependency diminished, it lessened and they gained more independence and were able, still with some help from my mom and dad, to begin to meet their own needs and in this time, the relational dynamics began to change.  Now as they are entering adulthood, they are largely able to meet their own needs and they are able to choose the level of relationship they want to have with their dad and I.  We are now in a season where they are choosing of their own free will how much they want to interact and engage with us.  I am so thankful and fortunate to have relationships with my young adult children where they are choosing of their own free will to be a regular part of my life, they are choosing to express love to me and their dad, and continue to invest in relationship with us more on their own terms.  This is not a perfect metaphor for the contrast between free will and predestination, but it represents what I believe is beautiful about the theology of free will - the idea that love that is freely offered makes for a richer, more meaningful relationship.    

Within Christian theology there are differing views on the amount of free will we as humans actually possess.  Some believe that we have ultimate freedom to choose to come into relationship with God, to respond to God’s grace and love in our lives, and some believe that we have no freedom to choose -that God predetermined before the beginning of time who would be chosen to be a part of the family of God.  These are the dualities of the theology I am going to explore today - in truth many people fall somewhere along a continuum in their beliefs on this issue, but as with so much in our day there seems to be a shrinking middle ground and more swing into the extremes on many issues and this is one I believe has been taken to extremes in the fundamentalist evangelical system.   

Arminianism and Calvinism are two contrasting systems of theology that speak to the issue of free will and predestination - the issue of how we come into relationship with God - whether by free will or by God’s predetermined will.  Some believe that we can come to relationship with God thorough our own free choice, our free will and some believe that our relationship with God is completely determined by God’s choice or will  - this is what’s called predestination.  These theologies attempt to explain the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility in seeking relationship with God.  Arminianism is named for Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch theologian who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s.  Calvinism is named for John Calvin, a French theologian who lived in the early 1500s and.  Both systems can be summarized with 5 points:

1. Arminianism holds to partial depravity while Calvinism holds to the total depravity of man.  Partial depravity states that every aspect of humanity is tainted by sin, but not to the extent that human beings are unable to place faith in God of their own choosing.  Total depravity asserts that every part of humanity is corrupted by sin and as a result human beings are unable to come to God of their own volition, their own choice.
2. Arminianism believes in conditional election,  Calvinism believes in unconditional election. Conditional election states that God elects or chooses individuals based on God’s foreknowledge of who will believe, with the understanding that people can individually choose God.  Unconditional election is the view that God elects or chooses individuals to salvation based entirely on God’s will, not on anything inherently worthy in the person or based on any act performed by the person.  
3. Arminianism sees atonement as unlimited or universal while Calvinism sees it as limited.  Limited atonement is the belief that Jesus only died for the elect, the chosen.  Unlimited or universal atonement is the belief that Jesus died for all. 
4. Arminianism holds the concept of prevenient grace - which is a grace that is present even before we enter relationship with God - a grace that calls all to relationship with God, but in this perspective - everyone has the ability to accept or reject that call of this grace on their lives.  On the Calvinist side there is the belief that God’s grace is irresistible..  Irresistible grace argues that when God calls a person to salvation, that person will inevitably come to salvation.  This ultimately comes down to the issues of free will - do we have free will to choose relationship with God or not? 
5. Arminianism holds to conditional salvation while Calvinism holds to the perseverance of saints.  Conditional salvation is the view that a believer in Christ can, by his/her own free will, turn away and thereby lose salvation.  Perseverance of the saints refers to the belief that a person who is elected or chosen by God will persevere in their faith and will never permanently deny Christ or turn away from God, and therefor can never lose their salvation.  

So - that’s a lot of dense theological information and you may be asking why does any of this matter?  Well, here’s the thing - what we believe matters and affects how we live.  What we believe - called our orthodoxy, affects how we live - called our orthopraxy -  which is how we walk out our beliefs.  I recently had a conversation with a good friend who basically said - let’s not go on and on about right beliefs, let’s just focus on living the right way.  I can understand that perspective, and for some people diving into the deep end of theological concepts is just not that interesting - but I believe it matters greatly what our core beliefs are.  

On the flip side, I do think there is potential harm in getting too focused on what we believe.  We can get so zeroed in on what we believe and arguing about what we believe and defending what we believe that we don’t even get to living out what we believe in our lives.  We can say we believe things, but if we don’t walk those beliefs out - do we really believe them or are we just paying them lip service.  Our actions reveal the truth of what we believe at our core, and therefore I do believe that it’s important that we carefully consider what those core beliefs are.

I grew up and served in churches into my 30s, that held to a Calvinist perspective.  And the consequences of that perspective, that theology are far reaching.  A belief in the total depravity of humanity leads to a pretty negative message about people and as a result leads to feelings of shame and unworthiness and some level of hopelessness that you can do better, or live as a good person in the world.  And it results in a pretty low view of others as well - believing that they are completely sinful and unable to make changes in their lives.  This core framework in our life can lead to deep levels of suspicion in relationships and affect the level of attachment that we are able to have with people and as a result can diminish the depth of our relationships and connections with others, because ultimately this belief leads to the understanding that everyone is approaching relationships with poor intentions.  

At its foundation, the Calvinist perspective teaches us that  we can’t trust our inner voice because we are utterly sinful in ourselves, and we need to look outside ourselves to determine truth.  Personally, I think this underlying narrative which I was taught and believed for the first 30 years of my life has greatly undermined my ability to listen to my inner voice and trust myself.   I’ve been working to heal that wound for a while now - working to learn to trust the goodness that is within me because I am created in the image of God.  I’ve been working to learn to listen to and trust my intuition, my gut, my inner voice -  instead of always looking outward for all the answers.  I’ve been learning to get curious about the thoughts and feelings that come up in my heart and mind and ask questions about the roots of these thoughts and feelings so I can address the harmful narratives of my past.  Truly learning to trust your inner voice can be very challenging for those who are steeped in the Calvinist perspective of total depravity.  

The Calvinist theology of unconditional election - the belief that God chooses who to have a relationship with and who God will ultimately condemn to hell - and that basically humans have no say in this, no free will, is very troubling to me.  One pastor we served with for 10 years said that there is no such thing as free will - everything is predetermined. Up to this point in my life, I’d been taught a bit of a more balanced perspective of free will and predestination.  In college I remember having discussions with other friends in our student ministry about this topic and with family members and finding that most people I talked with were holding to a bit of a both/and perspective on this issue - acknowledging that the Bible seems to support both of these perspectives and that this is a mystery of the faith.  But during my 20s and 30s there was a shift in the evangelical fundamentalist world toward a more strict view of Calvinism, which was represented by the pastor’s statement that there is no such thing as free will. 

I think this  leads to a very harmful view of God - a God it seems arbitrarily chooses who’s in and who’s out.  I came to a point where I just could not hold to this perspective any longer in light of all of the scripture passages that speak of God’s love, grace, mercy, and faithfulness.  Passages from the Psalms that tell us that surely God’s goodness, love and mercy will follow us all the days of our life, passages in the Psalms that repeatedly tell of God’s abundant mercy, love and faithfulness to us.  Passages from Isaiah that tell us that God waits to be gracious to us and rises up to show us mercy, passages from the gospel of John that tell us that God loved the world so much that God sent Jesus, so that everyone who believes will have eternal life, passages from 1 John that tell us that God is love and light and in God there is no darkness at all. Passages in James that tell us that mercy triumphs over judgment.

Additionally, I began to question the genuineness of a relationship that was completely based on predestination, that was completely predetermined by the sovereign and powerful will of God.  Is that really a  relationship or a dictate?  Authentic, life-giving relationships in our lives are those that we choose freely and invest into of our own accord; those that we can choose to be a part of or not be a part depending on what we determine is best for our own lives.  If you hold to a Calvinist perspective, ultimately relationship with God is contrived and obligatory, not chosen and free.  I believe that God desires relationship with us of our own free will, of our own choice because we come to understand and know the love, grace, mercy and goodness that God offers.   This view to me leads to a richer and deeper and more authentic relationship with God - one that I choose to engage in day by day.  This perspective ties into the metaphor I shared in the beginning of this podcast.  As we come to know God and understand God’s deep love, compassion, grace, mercy, and faithfulness toward us we grow in our desire to express love toward God.  1 John 4:19 tells us that “We love, because God first loved us.”  The love my young adult children express toward me is grounded in the love I expressed toward them, the attachment and provision that I provided for them in their younger years - it gives them a solid foundation to know that they can trust me and is a major aspect of what I think has allowed us to forge very positive more mutual relationships as they have entered adulthood.  In the same way we can freely come into relationship with God as we come to know the nature and heart of God more deeply.  

And beyond the issue of relationship with God, the hyper-Calvinist view that I heard during my 20s and 30s - telling me that everything in our lives was predetermined caused me to question the loving God I knew as I walked through significant life challenges - struggling with depression, losing a close friend to cancer at the age of 27, and facing the challenges of disability my boys had in life.  I wrestled with all of this while sitting under the teaching of pastors espousing increasingly hyper-calvanist views and my heart asked - did God cause all this - did God predetermine all of these challenges in my life.  Ultimately I began to question - if God is sovereign and predetermines all things, is God causing all the bad things to happen in the world?  That’s a pretty terrible thing to consider.  If God is completely sovereign, if there is no such as free will - an idea argued by some hyper-Calvanist teachers, although not something John Calvin himself would have taught, and if there’s no free will, doesn’t that ultimately mean that God is orchestrating everything that happens in our world good and bad.  This concept shook me and made me very troubled, very sad.

But as I wrestled with the hyper-calvanist perspective and reflected on my own journey of faith, my own soul sojourn, on a personal level, the God I knew was a loving and caring God, who had repeatedly shown love, mercy and compassion to me throughout my life - drawing me back when I had wandered away in seasons of sorrow and doubt and offering grace and welcome to return to relationship and community.  The God I knew was one who chases after the 1 lost sheep - leaving the 99 in the fold - the story we find told by Jesus in the gospel of Luke.  I came to a place of rejecting the extreme interpretation of God’s predestination espoused by the Calvinist teachers around me, because I could not reconcile that perspective with the loving God who had been a part of my life.  

I came to believe that we live in a fallen, crippled, broken world and as a result there are aspects of the world that are messed up, ruptured, shattered.. I came to believe that God’s heart breaks with ours as we face cancer, and disabilities, and mental health challenges, and as people around the world face war and oppression and all manner of losses in their lives.  God’s heart breaks with ours because this is not the way God intended the world to be - God created us to live in perfect relationship with them and with one another and Jesus came to redeem all that is and to bring restoration to our lives.  I came to believe that God’s desire is to bring heaven to earth as the Lord’s prayer says “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  And I became convinced that God is calling us to be a part of bringing that restoration to the world around us - to care for those who have been most impacted by the brokenness of our world - the poor and marginalized, the immigrant and the foreigner among us, the disabled and ill.  

One aspect of the Calvinist perspective which is perhaps still a bit appealing to me is the belief in the perseverance of the saints - also called eternal security.  This perspective holds to the view that once you are saved you are always saved.  That sounds really nice, doesn’t it.  I grew up with this perspective - believing that once I prayed the sinner’s prayer and asked Jesus into my heart, then I was set - I was in, I was good - I knew that I was going to heaven.  Here we have another allure of certainty - believing that you can be certain that you are going to live eternally in heaven with God’s people in a beautiful, amazing, loving place - that sounds amazing.  

But does that mean that you can say that sinner’s prayer one time and then live like hell your whole life and still end up in heaven?  What kind of  life does this perspective prompt us to live?  Does it move everyone toward living out the way of Jesus - to live out a life of caring for the least of these and expressing the fruits of the Spirit in our lives?  Sadly, I’ve seen that it does not always prompt a life lived in the way of Jesus - some hold to this perspective and then abuse the theology - living in a way that is against the principles of God’s loving way, and still claim to be “saved.”  

As I began studying the Arminian perspective of free will - it felt a lot more uncertain - we have the ability to choose relationship with God and this is a choice we have to keep making throughout our lives.  That’s scary and seems a bit harsh and yet to my heart it seemed the truer, more beautiful story of faith.  A faith that must keep growing and changing and following after God, a faith that proves itself genuine, authentic, and sincere over and over again.  This is more in keeping with the admonitions we find in Philippians 2:12 “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” and James 2:14-17 “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has not deeds?  Can such faith save them?  Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?  In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”  

The extremes of fundamentalism in the past 50 years have influenced the interpretation of the long-held view of Calvinism and have taken this understanding to a harsher and harsher place.  My husband reminds me when we talk about this issue of theology that the truth is most likely somewhere in the middle - not a place many are willing to inhabit in our current religious climate.  This middle place is a perspective that I remember people being more willing to consider as I began truly exploring this issue in my college years 30 years ago.  But this is an uncomfortable place of uncertainty that we struggle to make peace with.  Proponents of hyper-Calvinism are seeking to focus on the sovereignty of God and I can appreciate the desire to elevate God’s role in our world.   But I cannot swallow some of the other harsher elements of hyper-Calvinism that I spoke of earlier. I’ve personally seen the ways in which this theology can cause deep questions about the loving nature of God, I’ve seen how this perspective has done damage to relationships in my life and I’ve seen this perspective cause great division between people who hold differing views.  

As I considered the issue of fundamentalism in the last episode, and the issue of hyper-Calvinism, a perspective held by many in fundamentalist circles, I see systems of certainty that lead to a faith that is more narrow and constricted than the faith I want to live within.  I see in these systems an unwillingness to consider opposing positions, which results in a small vision of what living a life of faith can be.  My hope is that we can expand our vision of faith - I want to live within a spacious faith that allows for more gray, allows for more of the in-between.  I want to hold a generous orthodoxy - a generous structure of beliefs, that allows for more love and more grace and more mercy and more inclusion.  

As I close this episode I’d like to share a blessing I recently wrote called “Generous Orthodoxy”

Loving God, guide us in the way of generous living and generous frameworks

Help us to understand that your generosity far exceeds our ability to understand and receive

Help us to break free of the cramped, narrow, and limited perspectives we have held to or been placed within

Transform us God from people with tightly clenched fists, help us to let go of grasping and certainty

Teach us to, with open hands share your love, justice, joy and peace with hope and generosity

Help us to grasp the breadth and width, the depth and height of your love for us all

Give us hearts and lives that seek to share this great love liberally and openly

May we not be restricted by our poverty of expectation to grasp the richness you offer us

Open our hearts to see your expansiveness, your vast love and mercy

Move us more and more toward a place where we can truly receive and express your generous grace, your generous love, your generous mercy, your generous compassion to ourselves and to the world around us.

Give us hearts to live within and walk out a generous orthodoxy.

In the next episode we’re going to explore the ideas of patriarchy, and gender roles, and look at how those terms have affected me personally and how I believe they affect many in our culture.  I have invited my husband to join me as the 1st co-host on Soul Sojourn for this next episode.  We will have a frank and open conversation about these issues, how we are wrestling with them in real time, and how they have personally impacted our marriage.

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen today, for sticking with me through another theology lesson.  I hope that what I shared was helpful in some way for you on your own soul sojourn. If you believe in God, how do you view God’s heart toward humanity?  This is really at the core of the issues surrounding free will and predestination.  Who is God and how does God purpose to interact with humanity?  The God I know is a loving God who welcomes all into relationship who desire relationship.   I look forward to what is to come, what future stops we’ll take along the journey together.  I’ll see you at the next stop.